Faith as Tiny as a Mustard Seed

“Come and hear, all you who fear God.

Let me tell you what he has done for me.”

                      Psalm 66:16 NIV

I’ve spent most of my life running. Telling half truths. Using “I’m fine” to my advantage. All the while feigning that I am an open book. That may be the biggest lie I’ve ever told. If I am an open book then Edgar Allan Poe was a prophet. While I typically write confessional poetry they are wrapped tightly in simile, metaphor, and allegories dripping in angst, blood, sweat, and tears. There are just as many lies, over-exaggerations and allusions to what is really going on in my head as there are truth. This book is my written love letter to God, my apology to God, my family, my friends, and enemies. This book is my testimony and my admittance of guilt. It tells the truth of why I needed Christ. Why I needed saving. I will no longer deny who I am, where I came from, where I almost went, and the darkness that has existed inside my own heart.

You wouldn’t think you’d have a spiritual epiphany after watching a movie and climbing the face of a cliff with your bare hands. It’s kind of crazy how God works, and how those sort of things do happen when you’re least expecting it.

I guess I can’t say it was just a movie. “God’s Not Dead,” was more than just a movie. I could be saying that just because it made me cry, but it made me want to start listening to what God had to say. I wanted to do something drastic like the kids in that film did.

I’m a lazy person at heart. I spend most of my days playing video games, reading books; I am lazy in the sense that physical activity is the bane of my existence. So it was a shock that when I was on the annual A Cross Between Campus Ministry Spring Break Trip (say that ten times fast) that I willingly jumped right into a hiking expedition through the Ozarks in rural Missouri.

At first it was remotely tame, we walked through the woods. We had to take our time climbing down into the river valley. I of course, being the geek that I am, had a staff in the vein of Gandalf to walk around with. So I used to it’s advantage. I leaned on it and used it to pull me through.

If you know me well you know I have some gender identity issues. I’ve never quite felt like a man, being submissive in most of my relationships. Identifying as a crossdresser, and even contemplating getting sexual reassignment surgery, or if not at least living my life under the guise that I was female. This hiking expedition, while not only a man thing, some very beautiful, very feminine girls took this trek as well. So don’t get me wrong when I say that I preferred womanly pursuits and this was very out of character for me.

I am a Christian. At the time I was, and still am, very young christian. I struggle with issues, hang ups, and still had problems associating myself with the words manhood, masculinity, strong, faithful, and courageous. A group of about thirteen including myself split off from the bulk of our campus ministry. Kerry Cox led the charge to keep exploring for caves in the rock face. We found a cave, and tried to get other people to join us exploring it, but the rest of the group decided to start heading back and they took the path that we had used to get into the valley. We continued on, hoping that we might be able to find an easier route to return by. I had joked “suckers, they took the hard way back. I bet this way is easier.” Much like in the bible the road less traveled is not the easier road. Regardless, it is always the better path. It is the path that leads to the most change. The cliff, hill, mountain, death trap that we decided to climb up was at least 70 degrees in most situations and while there were plenty of places to grab a hold you could not always tell what you were about to grab and if it was going to be strong.

I did not think that I could do it. With each step Kerry and the other people in the group kept telling me I could. Though it was strange being encouraged the way that they did. These people were acting out an important part of spiritual relationships with your fellow believers. They were encouraging and spurring me on. We are called to encourage, and this was a situation where I was being called to climb to trust, and to be willing to accept that I was a man. To believe that I was made to do these kinds of things. Kerry with a straight face, not knowing the inner struggles in my heart or past kept repeating to me. “You are a man. You were made for this. You can do this. Just grab the next branch. Bear crawl up this mountain.”

I want to say that I had a great crisis in my head where I thought about the things that he was saying to me, that I came to a conclusion that “Yes I am a man. Yes I can.” That is not what happened, it was more of a decision to let go and fall, to keep on going, or to slowly back down and walk the hour or two that it would probably take me to get back to camp. Even then that is deliberating and elaborating the situation more than it actually was.

Fortunately, he was right, there was a shed of manhood, of masculinity in me that I hadn’t wrapped in lace. There was a part of me that heard those words “you are a man,” and took them to heart and I climbed the side of that cliff being pushed and pulled by other people prodding to the top. This was an intense moment for me, I never thought I could ever do anything this ridiculous. That being said I also didn’t think that I would still be alive, or even remotely happy, or dressed in pants and a t-shirt with a beard at this point in my life.

I climbed up that cliff. While to some it might have been simple. To others it might have just been a difficult climb, but for me it was a point in my life where I had to start choosing who I was, and while I still have urges and feelings and think that I might have been better off a girl. That day as I got to the top of that cliff and Kerry and I hugged and he showed me what I climbed up. I really began to understand God’s promises to prosper me and not to harm me.

Staring down at the cliff as they dropped a huge rock that quickly slammed it’s way to the river below and while overlooking the rolling Missouri countryside I suddenly understood it. Our struggles in life are like cliffs, they are like mountains. We cannot overcome them on our own. We have to trust and accept ourselves as who we are, we have to trust others and accept their help and encouragement, and above all we have to trust God that he made us exactly as he envisioned us. That we are beings that are perfect in his glory, that even though we are not perfect that we make mistakes, that we fail and get lost along the way. That Jesus Christ changes us, he saves us, and the fires of God change us and mold us into stronger beings. Without God I could have never overcome mountains. With him mountains turn into molehills. They’re still there. They don’t disappear, and it doesn’t get easier. It just gets more bearable. You don’t have to fight alone.